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 The hackers infiltrated the ministries' computer networks by
sending emails to staff containing tainted files with titles such as
"US_military_options_in_Syria," said FireEye, which sells virus
fighting technology to companies.
When recipients opened these documents, they loaded malicious code
on to their personal computers.
For about a week in late August, California-based FireEye said its
researchers were able to monitor the "inner workings" of the main
computer server used by the hackers to conduct their reconnaissance
and move across compromised systems.
FireEye lost access to the hackers after they moved to another
server shortly before the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia.
FireEye said it believes the hackers were preparing to start
stealing data just as the researchers lost access.
The U.S. company declined to identify the nations whose ministries
were hacked, although it said they were all members of the European
Union. FireEye said it reported the attacks to the victims through
the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A spokeswoman for the FBI, Jenny Shearer, declined to comment.
"The theme of the attacks was U.S. military intervention in Syria,"
said FireEye researcher Nart Villeneuve, one of six researchers who
prepared the report. "That seems to indicate something more than
intellectual property theft...The intent was to target those
involved with the G20."
The September 5-6 G20 summit was dominated by discussion of the
Syrian crisis, with some European leaders putting pressure on U.S.
President Barack Obama to hold off on taking military action against
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Villeneuve said he was confident that the hackers were from China
based on a variety of technical evidence, including the language
used on their control server, and the machines that they used to
test their malicious code.
Villeneuve said he did not have any evidence, however, that linked
the hackers to the Chinese government.
"All we have is technical data. There is no way to determine that
from technical data," Villeneuve said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said China opposed any
hacking activities.
"U.S. Internet companies are keen on hyping up the so-called hacker
threat from China, but they never obtain irrefutable proof, and what
so-called evidence they do get is widely doubted by experts. This is
neither professional nor responsible," Hong told a daily news
briefing in Beijing.
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ONE OF DOZENS
Western cybersecurity firms monitor several dozen hacking groups
operating in China, most of which they suspect of having ties to the
government. The firms also suspect the hacking groups of stealing
intellectual property for commercial gain.
China has long denied those allegations, saying it is the victim of
spying by the United States. Those claims gained some credibility
after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden
began leaking documents about U.S. surveillance of foreign
countries, including China.
FireEye said it had been following the hackers behind the
Syria-related attack for several years, but this is the first time
the group's activities have been publicly documented. The company
calls the group "Ke3chang," after the name of one of the files it
uses in one of its pieces of malicious software.
FireEye said it believed the hackers dubbed the Syria-related
campaign "moviestar" because that phrase was used as a tag on
communications between infected computers and the hackers'
command-and-control server.
In 2011, the group ran another operation dubbed "snake", which
enticed victims with a file that FireEye said contained nude
pictures of Carla Bruni, the Italian-French singer, songwriter and
model who in 2008 married then French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The host name for that campaign's command-and-control server
contained the string "g20news", which might indicate that it was
related to the G20 Finance Ministers meeting in Paris in 2011,
FireEye said.
The email address used to send those malicious files had the phrase
"consulate" in it, which also bolstered the possibility that the
attack was politically motivated, Villeneuve said.
He said researchers only gathered evidence about "snake" through
reviewing emails and malicious code. They did not have access to its
command-and-control server, which they did in the case of the
"moviestar" attack.
(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in
Beijing; editing by
Tiffany Wu and Grant McCool)
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